The science of ‘you are here’

Maria Isabel Garcia

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The science of ‘you are here’
[Science Solitaire] The fascinating way how our brains know where we are

He was on his way out to go to work on our first day in a foreign country where we would be living for many years. I had a few errands to run across town so I wanted some time with him to verify driving directions since I was quite worried that I would get on the freeway and get out on the wrong exit and never find my way back. But he was in a hurry and said in an incredibly calm tone with one foot already out the door: “Don’t worry honey, the world is round.” That would have been helpful if I were Magellan; but I was running multiple errands all day. I still wanted to get back home at the end of the day, curious to see if my husband just had great confidence in my navigational skills or he had other plans if I never came back.

I was able to get home at the end of that day and for the other days after that. I am one who would opt to drive when in another country. I can easily find my bearings wherever I am. I don’t easily panic when I get lost and up to now, long after my husband has passed on, I can still hear him in my head: “Don’t worry honey, the world is round.” But good thing is that is not the only thing that enables me to know my place – where I am at any given time. I have a kind of GPS in my head and so does every mammal.

The January issue of the Scientific American had an article by May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser – winners of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which they shared with John O’Keefe. They discovered how the brain knows where it is and even plans where it will go next.

In the article, they highlighted for us how other species find their way. Some, like the simple roundworm, does it by following a straight path to the source of an odor, with the smell getting stronger as it gets closer. Others like insects have an internal system that keeps track of their speed and direction in relation to where they started their journey. Mammals have a system where the paths they traverse create mental grids in the brain that form a mental picture of place. Not only that, these get stored as memory together with landmarks and what was experienced in that place. This is why “places” are not just spots on the map but personal pockets that are loaded with memories which are hard to replace.

Take for instance you just arrived in a new place like a new town. As you arrive, special neurons called “place cells” in your hippocampus (mainly associated with long-term memory) are firing. This is how you know where your location is. Now as you move about the town and go to a specific street, neurons called “grid cells” in your entohinal cortex (very close to the hippocampus) are firing in your head that correspond to that area. It also registers obstacles, even the orientation of your head as this is what determines forward, backward, left and right, up and down.  This continues as you walk or drive through the town. This “grid sense” together with landmarks you see are recorded in your hippocampus.  This is how you form a mental picture of your surroundings and not just your very specific location.

For patients with Alzheimer’s, the entohinal cortex is notorious for failing to work as the disease kills the cells in this area. Later on, it also mutes that place cells in the hippocampus. This is why Alzheimer’s patients often wander – without a sense of where they are and how they got there.

The fascinating work that led to the Nobel prize made me appreciate the process that many of us take for granted. I know some people, including my own Mom, who, even when she was younger, found it a real struggle to get her bearings in a new place, and sometimes even when it has already become an old place for her.

There are also questions that naturally arose from reading this. One is, is it a “capacity” we could lose with diminished use? With our dwindling attention spans brought about by our lives at click-speed, I want to know if our use of Google Maps and Waze decreases our capacity to navigate our places for ourselves.

Another is, would the “GPS” brain areas differ between people who stay indoors most of the time and those who spend a significant part of their lives outdoors. To take it to the extreme, I want to see what the brain of an explorer would look like compared to a full-time basement hacker.  I ask because the brain is notorious for strengthening our mental wiring for what we always do and for losing what we don’t.

My third question is an extension of the questions posed by the researchers themselves.  They asked if the positioning network also work for journeys involving thousands of miles like bird migrations. I would like to know how it would work in journeys in space. What if you get dropped somewhere in the cosmos, how would your brain “place” you?

I keep thinking that maybe if “positioning” is a wiring, then some have it but some don’t, due to a genetic condition. And even if we have it and it gets stronger or weaker depending on the use, then that could partially account for our differences in considering the long-term consequences of our actions. This is because knowing where you are involves knowing not just your coordinates in space but also in time. Maybe this “GPS” also partially determines how much of a future we can imagine. How could we “wire” ourselves to consider our place farther than town or country? How could we see farther than our own generation or beyond our children’s generation?  

This business of knowing where we are determines how we know where we are going. Ancient philosophies and religions run libraries, classrooms and pulpits on this but far more ancient is the compass we each possess, deep in our biology. – Rappler.com

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